Aug. 24

The Guardian on how the West’s political calculus is selling out Afghans:

It speaks volumes about the world today that a US president was more worried about the Taliban looking weak than about his western allies. Britain, France and Germany asked Joe Biden to continue evacuating civilians from Kabul past his self-imposed deadline of 31 August. But the US rejected these requests. Mr. Biden wanted to end the chaotic TV scenes from Afghanistan that hurt his domestic poll ratings. But he also accepted that Kabul’s new rulers could not afford to look weak in front of their rival Isis, which is looking for an opportunity to embarrass its Taliban peer.

The west’s airlift will therefore be over by next Tuesday. It is the Afghan people who will pay the highest price for the west’s defeated ambitions for their country. They now face living under Taliban rule for a second time. There is no guarantee that a grinding civil war is over. The scale of the west’s failure is not just that the world’s biggest economies will almost certainly fail to evacuate all those who were employed by its armies and diplomats. It is that we have let down a generation of urban Afghans, especially women, who grew up believing that their lives would be better than their parents’.

Afghanistan faces a series of crises that would tax the most able technocrats. Yet at the country’s helm is the world’s most obscurantist leadership. Covid has a long way to run in Afghanistan, but only 2% of the population has been vaccinated. The Taliban struggle with the idea of female doctors working in hospitals, let alone how to tackle coronavirus. A drought has caused famine in rural parts of the country, but Afghanistan’s new rulers see humanitarian work as the preserve of charities rather than the state.

The Taliban have no experience of legislating within a sophisticated political and legal framework, especially one of the kind modelled on western democracies. When they last ran the country, a cash economy did not exist. In the Afghan central bank, more than two decades ago, the Taliban installed military commanders. One died on the battlefield while still the bank’s governor.

The west’s economic model for Afghanistan was, at best, a work in progress. The country has become dependent on international assistance, while poverty rates have increased from a third of the population to more than a half. Unless something extraordinary happens, foreign aid will dry up, leaving the Taliban not only unable to pay for government salaries but also without the resources to cover Afghanistan’s import bill. With the US refusing to hand over Kabul’s dollar reserves, the Afghan currency is likely to collapse in value, sparking a price spiral. Inflation and scarcity are not exactly solid foundations on which to base the stability of a regime.

One cannot import development, only encourage it from within. Two Asian countries that have risen by throwing off outside rule – Vietnam and Bangladesh – show that it is possible to wean a country off foreign aid in a substantial way by creating an industrial base. The new Kabul regime is more likely to fall back on opium production, confirming its global pariah status while further diminishing the nation’s productive capacity.

Afghanistan’s complexity – its patchwork of ethnicities, traditions and minimal governance – makes it hard to understand. The G7 might be able to use a carrot-and-stick approach with the Taliban. It could offer cash in return for the group respecting human rights or threaten sanctions if Kabul breaks promises. The world, ultimately, will have to adjust to American interest in Afghanistan assuming more conventional proportions. Washington, in the future, will monitor jihadist threats from afar and seek to preserve political balance in Kabul. What has disappeared is the latest attempt to impose a new Afghan society on top of an old one.

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Aug. 23

The Philadelphia Inquirer on the city’s gun violence crisis:

If you’re looking for ways to quantify the depths of the gun violence crisis in Philadelphia, there may not be many bleaker statistics than this: There’s only been one day so far this year — Jan. 2 — when not a single person was shot in the city.

Since then, nearly 1,500 people have been shot in Philadelphia, including 295 fatalities. At least 50 other people were murdered by an assailant who used a weapon other than a gun.

Gun violence drives Philadelphia’s murder rate, which is on pace for a record this year, but it’s essential that the city also address three other factors if officials hope to stem a seemingly unrelenting tide of killings — increasing the rate at which murders are solved, fostering more cooperation from witnesses in criminal prosecutions, and rooting out corrupt officers whose bad practices later lead to convictions being overturned.

In Philadelphia, murderers have a better chance of winning a coin toss than being arrested. Last Wednesday, during the most recent briefing on the city’s response to gun violence, the police presented data showing that through Aug. 15, only 43% of homicides this year led to an arrest. That homicide clearance rate, or the percentage of killings that lead to an arrest, is on par with recent years.

An Inquirer analysis of all shooting incidents between January 2015 and November 2020, including both fatal and nonfatal shootings, found that out of 8,500 incidents only 21% resulted in an arrest or charge and 9% led to a conviction.

One reason for the low clearance rate is that the police and the District Attorney’s Office have a hard time getting witnesses to take the stand. District Attorney Larry Krasner cited witnesses’ failure to appear in court as a central reason for the declining conviction rate in gun cases.

Then, there is the grim reality that an arrest — or even a conviction — doesn’t always mean a homicide has been solved. For most of the 1980s, Philadelphia’s homicide clearance rate was above 80%. In the years since, the city has learned that didn’t mean that more than 80% of the actual perpetrators were arrested. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, at least 14 people convicted of a murder in Philadelphia during the 1980s have been exonerated. Since 2018 alone, the conviction integrity unit in Krasner’s office has exonerated 22 people.

These exonerations, as well as recent reporting by The Inquirer, have shed light on the coercive and illegal tactics detectives used to get false confessions. This month, Krasner charged three former homicide detectives for lying in the 2016 retrial of Anthony Wright, whose murder conviction was vacated due to DNA evidence.

Also this month, Krasner asked a judge to hold the Philadelphia Police Department in contempt for failing to turn over police misconduct records.

Philadelphia’s twin crises of gun violence and homicides are multilayered and intertwined. To reduce the number of unsolved murders in the city, the homicide clearance rate needs to go up. For the homicide clearance rate to go up, witnesses need to have faith that the system is actually seeking justice — not simply trying to improve its statistics by throwing another person in prison.

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Aug. 20

The (Columbia, S.C.) State on a city’s challenge to overcome a history tied to slavery:

Among the artifacts housed at the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C. is a poster, known as a broadside, advertising the auction of enslaved persons at the Charleston courthouse.

The people listed on the document range in age from a 1-month-old infant to a 70-year-old man named Old Peter.

Handwritten notations on the poster include the words healthy, very fine, breeding, and mostly white.

Charleston’s role in the slave trade — an estimated 40% of the enslaved Africans brought to the continent arrived in the city’s port — is well documented.

Some 155 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the city even issued an apology for the part it played.

But a belated apology would not erase the stain of slavery or the devastation it had wrought for centuries.

So, how does a city make amends for such atrocities? How does it redeem itself?

In Charleston, spurred by protestors seeking real change, city leaders created the Special Commission on Equity, Inclusion and Racial Conciliation in 2020.

Now, commissions and advisory councils are not uncommon in government, but this one had a mission more far-reaching, more ambitious than most.

According to the commission’s report on its findings, ”The recommendations in this report are initial steps that can be taken to achieve the stated purpose of the Commission to dismantle systemic racism and rebuilding Charleston as an actively anti-racist government.”

The report adds, ”We can’t find one example of a system where there are no racial disparities in outcomes: Health, Education, Criminal Justice, Housing, and so on. Baked into the creation and ongoing policies of our government, media, and other institutions, racism operates at individual, institutional, and structural levels and is therefore present in every system we examine.”

Hard truths, spoken plainly.

From there, the document lays out 125 recommendations, possible ways to righting some of those wrongs.

Among the recommendations, for instance, is addressing structural inequities in recruitment, hiring, and promotion of city employees, decreasing pay disparities for those employees and ”to make the City of Charleston a racially equitable working place.”

How would it do that?

The plan lays out a series of actions such as developing new city ordinances and processes for things such as auditing the demographical data of hiring and promotion and increasing ”the diversity recruitment and in-house pipeline for all city supervisors, managers, and human resource positions.”

Imagine if every employer in America took that step alone and truly worked to make their employees a better reflection of the American people today.

The other recommendations tackle everything from providing resources to historically underfunded schools to ”increasing mobility infrastructure,” which means improving sidewalks, streetscaping and lighting.

The plan seeks to better represent the history and culture of ”Black, Indigenous, and Other People of Color” with a board of public art review. It also includes budgeting for full-time public defender services and improving access to capital so 300 new Black owned businesses can become sustainable/viable over a five-year period.

Lofty goals, but all achievable.

The more controversial recommendations of the plan, however, led City Council this week to vote against formally receiving the report.

Talk of establishing a $100 million reparation fund using public/private partnerships to improve the economic well-being of Charleston’s Black population met with significant push back, even though the report was only being received, not implemented.

Change rarely comes as swiftly as it should, but a community must first recognize that change is needed.

The apology issued several years ago and the creation of this committee demonstrate that Charleston knows change is coming, but clearly it has a long way to go.

We urge other communities in the Palmetto State to look at their own histories and recognize that the sins of the past linger, and we urge Charleston to keep moving forward. The goal is not to rewrite history or erase it, but to learn from it.

The Washington Post

Aug. 25

Resettling Afghan refugees without delay could be a modest saving grace for the bungled departure

The Biden administration, having made inadequate preparations to evacuate U.S. allies in Afghanistan, now has what may be a fleeting chance to mitigate its missteps. After months of foot-dragging and pandemic-plagued inefficiency, it can hasten the resettlement of vetted, deserving Afghans in this country.
President Biden himself noted Tuesday that the leading nations have a “mutual obligation to support refugees and evacuees currently fleeing Afghanistan.” He pledged: “The United States will be a leader in these efforts and will look to the international community and to our partners to do the same.”

Mr. Biden is right that it is crucial for this country to lead by example. However, refugees generally, and at-risk Afghans in particular, have been admitted at a trickle this year, as the Biden administration, skittish over an unrelated surge of asylum seekers at the southern border, put the brakes on a resettlement program that had already slowed to a crawl under the Trump administration. Afghans who aided U.S. troops and officials as translators, fixers or in other capacities, often at risk to their lives, qualified separately for so-called special immigrant visas. But that program has been tangled in red tape; thousands who qualified were stuck in a years-long processing pipeline.


At this point, despite Mr. Biden’s assurances to the contrary, the possibility of rescuing all the Afghans to whom this country owes an obligation is looking increasingly remote, though it must remain the objective. If he sticks to next Tuesday’s deadline for a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Kabul’s airport, it’s hard to imagine a scenario that does not consign some, perhaps many, desperate Afghans to a grim future. It’s all the more pressing, then, that the nation fulfill its duty by resettling in this country as many of those who do make it out as possible, with no more delay than required for security screenings. That’s not only the morally correct thing to do; it also comports with American traditions and inclinations.




An available mechanism to achieve that is known as “humanitarian parole” — a legal tool to admit vulnerable and at-risk people to the United States in circumstances exactly like those faced by thousands of Afghans now thronging the airport in Kabul. The parole program is intended for individuals with what the State Department calls “urgent humanitarian” reasons to be in the United States who also merit “a favorable exercise of discretion.” Those criteria fit many fleeing Afghans to a tee, and the administration should grant parole liberally.


Other nations, including our NATO allies, are prepared to admit evacuees; some are already doing so. In this country, it is a hopeful sign that so many ordinary Americans are eager to help. Agencies that work with refugees say they have been overwhelmed with volunteers and other offers of aid in recent days. At Fort Bliss in Texas, where hundreds of Afghan evacuees have already arrived, the Army’s 1st Armored Division reported a similar flood of requests from people eager to lend their time and, in some cases, even their homes.


In Washington, D.C., an Afghan restaurant, Lapis, located in Adams Morgan, announced last week it would accept household and other goods for refugees. After just four days, it was inundated with donations from hundreds of people; it conveyed them in a crammed 18-foot truck to a Lutheran resettlement agency, even as more contributions continued to arrive.


In Afghanistan, the administration failed to execute an orderly departure. It failed to provide an efficient evacuation for Afghans vital to America’s mission. Now comes another moment of testing: How will this country welcome those who manage to leave and seek a new life?

See also: Taliban success in Afghanistan seen as boost for extremists

See also: With Merkel going, candidates fail to inspire German voters